Page 44 of Undercover
The door opened onto a loading-dock type area. In addition to the yoga mats, and the usual crates and tools, the area held a single chair, occupied by Dave. Who’d been tied to it, his ankles bound to the legs of the chair with duct tape, and his hands fastened down with more duct tape wrapped around the seat of the chair and over his lap and forearms.
Adam stood next to him, a gun pointed at his head.
For a second my vision blurred, black spots dancing in front of my eyes. I wavered and caught myself on the doorframe.
“Don’t move!” Adam hissed, waving the gun at me. “I’ll shoot him. Or you. I don’t care! Where’s the Fed?”
“The what?” Not the most intelligent response, but I could hardly think, let alone process what the fuck was happening. I didn’t have any problem with guns, and was actually a pretty good shot. My prep school had offered marksmanship as one of its electives. But it turned out having one pointed at you, with the hole at the end of the barrel looming disproportionately huge and black given its actual size, made a really big difference. “What?”
Adam sneered at me, and he swung the gun back to point right at Dave’s head. “The FBI agent,” he said slowly and carefully, likeIwas the insane one here. “Alec, or whatever he calls himself. Where the fuck is he?”
Alec. FBI agent. Alec?
Oh,shit.
Like a slow-motion landslide, everything fell into place. Alec hadn’t been interested in my money, because he wanted something else: an idiot he could use to gather information. If he’d been investigating Adam—and given Adam had me and my brother at gunpoint, that didn’t feel like a stretch—then I’d have been the perfect idiot. Connected to Adam, but not too closely connected. Able to get Alec in the door at Middleton Marine to poke around undercover.
He hadn’t wanted to sleep with me, probably because he had some little tiny shred of a conscience that told him fucking someone under false pretenses was, you know, fuckingwrong.
Until sleeping with me got him upstairs into the executive offices.
And then, line crossed…so he might as well get all the rest of the milk for free, since he’d never had any real interest in the cow.
Adam’s harsh, cracking laugh snapped me out of my misery. Right. Gun. I blinked away the moisture in my eyes. I had bigger problems than being treated like a disposable object.
“Oh my fucking God,” Adam said, his voice going high, the gun shaking in his hand and bumping against Dave’s head. Dave winced and flinched, and Adam hit him with the barrel, on purpose this time, not hard enough to concuss him but definitely hard enough to hurt. Adam’s face had gone mottled white and purple, and his eyes held a crazed, terrifying gleam. “Are you fucking kidding me right now? You didn’tknow?”
Oh God, oh God, what was my move here…Adam was obviously losing his shit. He’d kill us both. And I didn’t even know what he’d done to attract the FBI’s attention in the first place. If I told Adam I hadn’t knowingly assisted Alec’s investigation, would that make him more or less likely to shoot me?
“Of course he didn’t know,” Dave spat, stupidly in my opinion. But bravely. God, Dave was such a stubborn asshole, for good and for ill. “Gabe wouldn’t have brought an agent to our party without giving me or Dad a heads-up. He has some loyalty, unlikeyou, you fucking prick!”
“Shut up!” Adam shouted, and ground the barrel of the gun against Dave’s temple. “This didn’t need to have anything to do with you!”
“What didn’t?” I demanded, desperate to attract Adam’s attention away from Dave. Adam might shoot any second. He needed to cool down, just a little bit, fuck, just a little. Maybe if he shot at me, at this distance and with his hands shaking he’d wing me instead of killing me.
He didn’t bite. The gun stayed firmly pressed against my brother’s head. Sweat trickled down Dave’s face, and he’d gone kind of frighteningly pale under his yachting tan.
“Nothing that has anything to do with you either,” he snarled. “Or it shouldn’t have, until you snuck your Fed upstairs to look through my stuff. And thenDave, here,” he gave the gun another shove, “had to show up today, while I was trying to get everything out of here!”
My mind raced, my heart raced, and the rest of my body felt like I’d been frozen in some kind of toxic Jell-O. I had to get that gun away from Dave’s head. Even if Adam didn’t shoot him, Dave looked like he might go into serious shock any second.
“Get what out of here?” I asked, my voice coming out shaky as hell. Not surprising. I could feel my heartbeat in my hair at this point. “What have you been doing, Adam? How do you know Alec’s FBI? And why did you want me to bring him here, if you’ve been doing something wrong? You know what, it doesn’t matter. Just—tie me up too, okay? And go. Take your—whatever it is, and go, and you’ll be long gone by the time anyone checks up on us.”
“Right, because you expect me to believe Alec isn’t already on his way here with the entire sheriff’s department. I wanted him here alone so I could deal with him before he told anyone.” Oh, God. Deal with him. That could only mean one thing. And if Adam was desperate enough to try to kill a federal agent…I thought I might throw up. If he’d be willing to kill Alec, what would he do tous? Adam fulfilled my worst fears when he said, “No. Dave can stay here, but you’re coming with me. I need a hostage.”
He swung his gun in my direction, his aim a lot steadier than I’d expected, the barrel yawning wide in my terrified gaze.
Fuck. I’d accomplished my goal, but somehow I didn’t feel much better.
Maybe Alec really was on his way with every cop in Shelburne, and I only had to stall for time.
And maybe not. Because I could hear the rumble of an engine, now that I was listening for it. Adam’s boat, almost certainly, moored out back and ready to go.
Maybe I’d die in the next five minutes, and that text I’d sent would be the last time he’d ever hear from me. Maybe Adam would take me on his boat and kill me out on the lake, or I’d get killed when the Coast Guard came after us.
Either way, I didn’t think I’d make it.
14
